The Westerners Part 34

The unaccustomed stimulant cleared her vision. The room stood still, the different objects in it became distinct. She looked on the whirling figure of the woman in the centre, the open-mouth turmoil-stirred crowd in the background, with dispa.s.sionate eyes. She was deadly cool. To her memory came Graham's words of that same afternoon. "_Because you are too good for them!_" She remembered the very emphasis of his tone. Well, he was right, and yet not right. She had been too good for them, but she world show them now! With the sudden flash of resolve, the first unnatural hardening effect of the whisky pa.s.sed, and in a whirl the exhilaration came. She laughed and responded convulsively to the man's embrace.

Bismarck Anne gave a final kick, and fell in some one's open arms. The men, shouting frantically, began to stir preparatory to regaining their feet. Then they sank back again with a fresh cheer. Into the centre of the ring Molly tripped unsteadily, and stood for a moment looking about her with uncertain foolishly smiling eyes. Her cheeks were a glow of red. She glanced toward the musicians, and, with the tip of her fingers, raised her dress to her knees, waiting for the music to begin.

The room was deadly still. She could see, looking at her excitedly, all the men she had met and come to know in the last year. She saw them dimly, as through a haze. Would the music never begin? What were they waiting for? A draught blew cold along the floor. She felt it on her legs. Why was it? Oh, yes, she was holding her skirts up to dance, to show them that she was no better than this woman, Bismarck Anne.

And then the black cloud that had been gathering so long, the undefined guilty feeling at nothing, broke over her. She wanted to go on--the music had begun now--but she could not. Twice she tried. Something held her, something real, something stronger than herself. She did not recognize them, these ancestral voices, but they laid upon her their commands. She dropped her skirts, and covered her eyes with her two hands, and burst through the ring of men, and ran out through the night to her own cabin, where she threw herself on her bed weeping bitterly.

She was ashamed.

x.x.xI

LAFOND'S FIRST CARD

Lafond, in the meantime, had left the dispensation of drinks almost entirely to Frosty. He darted here and there in the crowd, a light of unwonted excitement in his eye.

"That thar Mike's sh.o.r.e waked up," commented Old Mizzou. "Never see him so plumb animated. He sh.o.r.e looks nutty. Dance halls is mostly too rich fer his blood, I reckon."

But Tony Houston and Jack Snowie and a dozen others by now knew better than to attribute this excitement to dance halls. Lafond possessed in his pocket a copy of Knapp's dismissal, and he had told them of it.

He told them of it mysteriously, in half-limits, pointing out tendencies and solutions to what they already knew, leaving them to draw deductions, sowing anxieties that there might spring up a harvest of distrust.

Through the woof of gayety he rapidly ran a dull thread of angry suspicion. Men made merry, and forgot all the past and all the future.

Other men talked low-voiced in corners, and tried, from the distraction of drink and gayety, to draw clear plan and reflection. And always Lafond took other men aside and whispered eager little half-confidences, and went on quickly to the next.

His spirit was upheld by a great excitement, such as it had never experienced before, not even in his early and adventurous days. He seemed to himself to be mounting higher and higher on the summit of a great wave of luck, as a swimmer is lifted by the sea. And yet, behind it all, again for the first time in his life, he felt a portent in the air. It was as though the wave were rearing itself, only to curl over and break upon the sh.o.r.e. He laid this to nervousness, and yet it affected him with a certain superst.i.tious awe.

So occupied was he, that he quite missed the girl's sudden exit, and was drawn from his brown study only by the sudden hush that succeeded it. In the silence a drunken voice uplifted itself loudly.

"M' work 'sh done," it vociferated. "I wan' m' pay!"

Everybody turned, prepared to laugh at this "comic relief!" Jack Snowie was addressing Billy Knapp. Billy at once became conscious of an audience, and the usual desire to appear well seized him. He smiled with the good-humored tolerance of a drunken man.

"I suppose you want me to take it right out of my pants pocket, eh, Jack?" he inquired paternally. "Of co'se you wants yo' pay! Come around in th' mornin' an' get it." He smiled again at the group that surrounded him. It appeared to be listening to this colloquy with unusual interest.

"I wan' m' pay!" reiterated Snowie sullenly, but then apparently lost the thread of his ideas and lurched away. Billy considered the incident closed. He was mistaken. The group did not dissolve; it came closer. The men had a strangely unfriendly look about the eyes. Billy did not understand it. He stepped toward one side of the circle about him. It closed the tighter to keep him in.

"What's the joke, boys?" he asked, still smiling.

The room was breathlessly still. Many of those within it did not understand the trouble, but trouble was in the air. Across a wavering line of heat could be dimly discerned the musicians, poised to start the next dance, but uncertain whether or not to begin. They did not begin. The silence was startled even by Peter's doggy yawn from the far corner of the saloon proper.

"Ain't no joke!" "That's what we want to know!" "d.a.m.ned poor joke!"

"You'll find out soon enough!" cried the men angrily, and then paused and looked at each other because of the jostle of words that meant nothing.

Billy flushed slowly, and his jaw settled into place.

"I'm jest as willin' to play 'horse' as anybody," he said, trying to find calm utterance; "and if this is a joke, I wishes some fellow-citizen to let me in. But, d.a.m.n it!" he cried in a burst, "don't you get too funny! What the h.e.l.l does you-all want me to do to carry out this yere witticism, anyway?"

The coolest and most determined looking man in the group made two steps across the floor, and confronted Billy squarely. At this evidence of earnestness, Billy lost his excitement and became deadly cool.

"Oh, it's you, Tony Houston, is it! Do you want your pay too?"

"Yes, I do," replied the man, "and I'm going to have it."

"Well," said Billy, "here's a pretty-lookin' outfit! Snowie was drunk, but this gang 's sober enough to know better, anyway. You come around to my office in the mornin', and I pays the bunch, every d.a.m.n skunk, and don't you ever any of you show your faces there again. That's all I got to say."

"It ain't all _I_ got to say," retorted Houston, standing his ground doggedly, "not by a long shot! You-all talks well, but has you got th'

money?"

"What the----" cried Billy, choking.

"Hol' on thar! I repeats it"--and Houston thrust his face at Billy evilly--"has you got th' money? That's a fa'r question in business, I reckons. Has you got th' money? No, you hasn't. You got just an hundred and fifty-two dollars, and that's every red cent you has got."

Billy's immediate act of homicide was checked by this astounding knowledge of the total of his bank account. "d.a.m.n you, Tony Houston,"

he said slowly, at last, "I believe you're drunk too. You come in the mornin' and get paid, an' you'll find yore money comes along all right.

This is a h.e.l.l of a gang," he went on with contempt, "a h.e.l.l of a gang!

I gets you a job that lasts you all winter, and you wants your d.a.m.n money in a dance hall and raises a row because I ain't carryin' a few thousan' dollars in each pants pocket. Don' think you makes anythin'

by it. I lays myself out from now on to see that yore little two by four prospect holes ain't worth th' powder to blow 'em up, and I reckon I has a little influence as superintendent of this game."

"Superintendent?" cried Houston, and the men about laughed loudly.

Billy was plainly even more bewildered than angry. He considered the crowd all, as he expressed it, "plum' locoed"; but his pa.s.sions, never of the most peaceful, were rising. In another moment he would have knocked Houston down and drawn his gun on the crowd which surrounded him, but that Michal Lafond shoved his way through the press. Billy caught sight of him with relief. Besides the plain bare fact of a row, the situation was complicated by the presence of so great an audience, before whom Billy naturally wished to conduct the affair correctly.

"What is the trouble? Here, this won't do!" cried Black Mike, as though in the capacity of proprietor preserving the respectability of his establishment.

"That's what I wants to know," cried Billy. "This (sulphurous) outfit of ranikaboo ijits has gone plum' locoed, and they stan's around yere howlin' for tha'r money as though I carries th' Philadelphy mint in my clothes!"

Lafond did not reply. He motioned the men aside, and, with the utmost gentleness, led the wondering Billy to a far corner of the room.

"I'm sorry that I have this to do, Billy," said Lafond. "I don't want to. It's none of my lay-out. But these men of yours sent them to me because I am notary public and I must do it."

Billy did not understand, but he caught the apology in Lafond's tone.

"That's all right, old man," he a.s.sured the latter, moistening his lips.

Without further preamble, the half-breed drew some papers from his breast pocket, and handed them to Billy.

The first was a review of the work done on the Great Snake group of claims, and a detailed a.n.a.lysis of it, carried out with astounding minuteness of technical knowledge for one so ignorant of mining as Stevens. It outlined also the work that should have been done; and it ended with a general conclusion of incompetence. The second contained his formal dismissal as superintendent. The third returned Billy's shares as his portion in the Company's dissolution, said Company having dissolved without a.s.sets.

Billy sat very quietly and read the papers over three times, while his fellow townsmen stood silent and watched him. The first perusal bewildered him, and turned him sick at heart with disappointment and recognition of the estimate in which men held him. The second brought to his consciousness that his companions were regarding him; and that, in turn, caused him to realize that his prestige was crumbled, his integrity dishonored, his abilities belittled. The third impressed on him the desperate straits in which he found himself--without money, holding a doubtful interest in claims whose bad name was by this established so firmly that no Eastern capital would ever take hold of them again, the moral if not legal debtor to these men who had worked all winter for him. The iron turned in his soul. Michal Lafond, sitting there in the role of sympathizer, was well satisfied with his handiwork. For the moment, Billy Knapp was a broken man.

He arose slowly, and pa.s.sed out of the door in the dead silence of those about him.

After his exit, the dance was forgotten and an earnest discussion raged. It was no light matter. Eleven men had invested heavily in powder, fuse, drills, and windla.s.ses for the purpose of fulfilling their contract with Knapp; and they, and twenty-two others, had put in their time for a number of months. Many of them owed for board or materials. Others, though out of debt, had spent nearly all their ready cash. They all seemed desperately close to bankruptcy, for Lafond said nothing whatever respecting his agreement to pay the contracts himself. And then again, as has been pointed out, the well-being of the whole camp had depended intimately on the success of its big mine, for the success of one enterprise like the Great Snake draws other capital to the district, rendering possible the sale of claims; while its failure always gives a bad name to a whole section.

So the ensuing discussion had plenty of interest for everybody.

Lafond, as the bearer of the tidings, was besieged with questions. He was reluctant, but he answered. Besides, the facts were plain, ready for interpretation. n.o.body could help seeing that it was all Billy's fault. After a time, poor Billy loomed large as a symbol of all the camp's misfortune. After a little time more, when the bar had more thoroughly done its work, a number became possessed of a desire to abate Billy.